So they knapped away at each other, bang, bang, bang, and sparks would fly. Schist would be sitting by the fire sniffing his mash, and Hawk would come into camp all bloody with a saiga rear over his neck and the hooves hanging down his chest before him. The mass over his shoulders gave him a bison look, and as he passed between Schist and the fire he dipped his head toward Schist, as if to a female being told to submit. Schist saw it and surged to his feet, which meant he almost got a hoof in the eye, and he swept the hoof aside, but this brought the other hoof into the side of his face, even though Hawk was stepping back as it happened, and could pretend it was an accident and laugh. Schist fumed while Hawk hefted the rump and legs off his head and held them out as if to protect himself. Schist cursed him, red-faced, and Hawk waggled the saiga hooves at him, another bull command to bison women.-Out of my way, old man. I was just trying to get by the fire to the cutting stone, don’t know why you jumped up at me like that!
To which Schist could only scowl and stomp off to the wood pile.
Endless number of incidents like that. It got tedious. Their jokes were too pointed. There were two score nine of them in the pack now, and three of the married women were pregnant. In a lot of ways things were good. They had not starved last spring very much, and it was looking like they were going to be all right for the coming spring. Seemed like that could last for year after year; so why the tension? Was it just something about the men who took charge, the ones who wanted to be headman? The young one going after the old one, the old one fighting back? They saw that a lot out in the herds. But did the pack really need a headman? A lot of packs seemed to work fine without them; the men did what needed doing, the women made the family and clan decisions without fuss in a continuous flow of talk, and things went fine. It would be good to be in a pack like that. Loon had cause to wonder whether Hawk would like it too. But he thought Moss would. And Hawk disposed, but Moss proposed. This was something Loon knew without Heather’s help, that he had seen his whole life, since they were all little boys together.
Once Loon was down by Ordech-Meets-Urdecha, and he came on two rhinos having a fight in a snowy meadow. He stepped back behind a tree and sat to look around it and see them. The wool on the two low round creatures was thick and long, black on top, crusted with snow on their undersides. They were funny-looking animals, like the unspeakables of the forest but with their horns proud and dangerous-looking, like prongs on their nose turned into spears. These were their weapons; they seldom bit each other, but instead swung their heads sideways together in great clacking collisions that sometimes caused them to stagger back and the skin around the base of their horns to bleed. A quick sideways thrust could cut a throat or put out an eye, so it could go from a dominance fight to a deadly quarrel at any instant, and almost every bull rhino was scarred around his head.
Now these two faced off, snorting and panting. They had been at it a while and both were bloody, the snow under them splotched with red. Their little eyes bulged as they glared at each other and waited for an opening: they wouldn’t have seen Loon even if he had danced right between them.
They slapped horns together in the usual way, with a kind of dance timing that reminded Loon how much the two fighters had to be in agreement to fight. The clacks sounded like when big solid barkless branches were knocked together, but more hollow.
Then one dipped his head left, and when the other swung to meet it, ducked his horn under and jerked it straight up. The other one saw this and leaped back to avoid the upward thrust, and immediately the first one charged, slapping left and right with furious speed, battering horn against head in a rapid sequence of smacks. The retreating one turned while roaring, very agile on its hooves, and ran hard away. The winner could have followed and horned him in the rump if he had wanted to, but he stood foursquare on the bloody snow and lifted his nose, sniffing disdainfully and then opening his little mouth to emit a short low roar.
Loon went out on a winter hunt with Hawk and Moss and Nevermind and Spearthrower. Thorn came along too; now that he had recovered his strength, he could keep up with the young men in all but their fastest sprints.
Up Lower’s Upper, onto the broad moor to the north. Ah the huge pleasure of walking hard with his friends, uphill and down, pushing the pace, out on a dawn patrol. Left leg stiff, and with a little numbness inside, suggesting things Loon shouldn’t try, reminding him always to rely on Goodleg to take the load when there were any questions: but no pain. Ah the glory of the dawn hunt!
They were going to go west on the plateau, along its edge to the head of Northerly canyon, and then creep down the headwall to the meadow below the cleft between the Ice Tits, where a herd of bison appeared to be wintering. If they got to the Giants’ Knapsite before the bison passed by, they might be able to spear some from their usual blind. They had not been there since the previous fall.
It was a crisp late winter dawn, the air in the valley hazy. Firestarter was plunging into the western skyline, dimming as the sky went gray and then pale blue. The rabbit in the moon was stirring her red paint to throw at the dawn. The meadow at the head of Northerly canyon was empty except for a handful of snow hares, nearly invisible in their white coats, looking nervously around, nostrils pulsing. They were very hard to kill with a throwing spear, which did not keep the men from trying a throw from above, everyone at once, a rain of long flexing spears lancing down onto the meadow, and by chance one of them pinned a running hare right to the grass. It was dead by the time they got down to retrieve it, and it turned out to be Loon’s spear.-Thank you! Loon exclaimed to the hare with a brief kiss to its forehead. He bagged it and looped the bag over his belt at his back, and the hare joined him for the rest of the day, which would make him fast. It would also add to their scent, but they were already completely obvious to the animals with a nose anyway, so it didn’t matter. They would cook the hare if they stayed out that night.
Down the winding route they had established in Northerly’s highest part. Through a notch between rocks taller than they were, down to the Giants’ Knapsite, to wait in the blind and see which way the wind blew.
The Knapsite was a tumble of big flinty boulders, mostly free of smaller rocks. The exposed cliff above them was spalling onto the slope below it, and the slope was at an angle that sorted the rocks by size, with the biggest falling the farthest, as usual. Some house-sized boulders had rolled far enough out to pinch a meadow that curved around them and extended both upstream and down.
There was a flat spot incised into the top of one of these boulders, as if the giants had wanted men to hide there. They hauled themselves up a number of knobs that allowed one to climb the boulder’s uphill side. The incised platform was big enough to hold all of them easily, and its lookout spot gave a view of the head of the curving meadow. The valley walls were steep, and lightly forested with brush pines. The wind was flowing downstream in typical morning style, so if any animals came downvalley they would not smell the men or the dead hare. It was warm for a winter day, though cold in the shade. The sound of the creek making its slow turn under the ice came mostly from the lead at the outlet, clucking away.
Hawk took the lookout first, and soon hissed, and the men fell completely silent as they flowed to positions beside him, hoping to see for themselves.
The bison were there. A little pack of them, hairy-headed and ragged after the winter. Nine women bison followed the chief bull, the women in better proportion than the men because they did not have such massive heads. Beautiful creatures, as always, their close tan fur only a little darker than lions’ fur, their hairy heads the brown nearest black; all moving slowly together, chewing their cuds, the sunlight diving right into their bodies, so that they glowed with their weight, floated on the snow of the meadow like visitors from a denser world. Dream creatures, walking through the waking world.